Video Games and Microlearning: At Last a Training I can Make it Through!

I had the opportunity to go to some excellent professional development sessions at the Learning Solutions conference. A few threads I noticed that throughout the sessions I attended highlighted that learning professionals are currently focused on delivering help to their clients exactly when they need it and with minimal interruption to their workflow. The most popular term I heard to describe this thread was microlearning.

Consider that video game industry had figured out microlearning over a decade ago. Video game developers face a unique combination of challenges:

• Their users need to be having fun at all times
• Their users must be challenged, but not frustrated
• They must learn a completely new set of skills to accomplish increasingly complex tasks.
• Depending on the game, developers are expected to follow certain conventions, while also creating a unique experience for their customers

If I adjusted the wording slightly above, you would think that I was talking about the challenges learning designers face when creating training. However, video game developers have been refining their toolkit to meet these challenges with creative and fun solutions.

It is interesting to follow the evolution of where the gaming industry started with teaching their users how to play games and where they are now. Every video game used to come with an instruction manual that the player was supposed to read before starting the game. Over the years, these instructions guides continued to thin until some games just stopped including them altogether. The developer figured out that it was cheaper and more effective to teach the players as they needed the information. Imagine trying to remember the list of armor and consumable items shown in the video game manual below:

A video game manual for Crystalis (Nintendo)
Credit: videogamegrowingpains.blogspot.com

Ironically, in the training and development world we are still guilty of creating loads of guides and training books. Your company’s onboarding guide may be asking you to memorize the equivalent of what the manual above is (just add 30 pages!).

A good example of how video games can be efficient with “training” solutions is shown below in this screenshot taken from Bioshock. Like with most video games, Bioshock needs time to load the “map”, leaving players waiting around. The developers used this opportunity to give their users a quick tutorial. The great part about these tutorials is that players can immediately practice their skill in a meaningful context after the loading screen disappears.

A Screenshot of Bioshock
Credit: 2k Games

Games also include what Don Norman famously coined “Knowledge in the World”. In Norman’s book the Design of Everyday Things, he described how effective memory uses all the clues available in its environment combined with the knowledge in the head to function sufficiently. He noted that “The unaided mind is surprisingly limited. It is things that make us smart. Take advantage of them.” What Norman was trying to get a across was that we must intentionally design our environment to account for the limitations of human memory retrieval and lack of training.

Likewise, returning to my example of how video game developers are using solid design principles, games are now sneaking in microlearning as players move through the game. For instance, in Star Wars Battlefront 2, the player is prompted with actions of what do on the screen in their first mission. This helps them get acclimated to the expectations of the game, but also blends seamlessly into the gaming experience. On the left side of the image the player is given handy information that can use with the character on the screen. On the right, there is a small icon, most likely representing the equipment the player is currently using. The two buttons below indicate which buttons the player must push to change the equipment with other options.

A Screenshot of Star Wars Battlefront 2
Credit: EA Games

So, looking at the world of gaming, where should training and development go from here? It is hard to argue with the success of the gaming industry to train its players while also keeping them engaged. Instructional designers (and their counterparts) need to think of ways to provide contextual help to their clients. That help may come through some of the digital tools that employees are using in the environment, but designers may have to think of some less traditional methods of embedding help in the physical environment of the workplace or school as well.

Microlearning in Higher Education

Coming from higher-ed, I know firsthand that it takes more than a good idea to topple the Ivory Tower. In the minds many educators, tradition is self-preservation or in the words of George Orwell’s 1984, “Ignorance is Strength.” In short, many stakeholders in higher-education are resistant to change in practice, even if the recommended changes have empirical support. Inversely, I would not view myself as a hardliner on higher-ed making itself look like corporate in every aspect. However, I think that higher-ed is supposed to be at the front-lines of experimentation and discovery. Being liberated from ROI and shareholders, higher-ed should be pushing the boundaries of what we know works. However, my experience in higher-ed has shown me the incentives for faculty to change their teaching is controlled by different factors such as promotion and tenure.

Ultimately, once you consider the difficulties of changing culture, the most viable outlook for the future will predictably come from outside the area of higher-education. Incentives in higher-ed are currently misaligned with putting energy into innovative teaching/training ideas. Going back to our example of how video games have been pioneering these concepts, we continually see improvement across the industry because user experience drives what games and franchises are successful. In the education world this the market will be partially driven by the acknowledgement of talent originating from innovative schools by the corporate world. The general public will invest in these schools when the value they produce is clear and it is acknowledged by respected industry professionals.

Microlearning in practice

The problem with articles such as this one are trying to find take-aways that you can actually use in your professional practice beyond a pep-talk for how we should be developing our training sessions and courses. Everyone is short on time and looking for applications over concepts. I am still exploring these concepts and applying what I can as a go. However, I can share a few things to get you started

• Develop a short style guide that incorporates microlearning applications — I use style guides for a lot of the online course development that I do daily. Style guides take some of the hard work of referencing all the researched-based justifications I cooked up for some of my design decisions. It is less reasonable to have all the research at-hand to reference at a moments notice and easier to have a style guide that just tells you what to do. You can always revisit the style guide every so often to make sure it is up-to-date.
• Challenging learners whenever possible — When trying to train people, there is an opportunity to make them think about the material deeply through providing questions that challenge their knowledge. Keeping in-sync with the microlearning concept, make sure the information they need to solve the question or puzzle is within easy reach. Finding ways to challenge people as they go about their daily routines is also fun. See if you can break people out autopilot! This might mean engaging them somewhere on the company’s intra-office website or actually in the office environment.
• Consolidate information with activities wherever possible — People who have been developing training as a living know that most of the people taking your training are not thrilled to be there. Any activity, from the perspective of the trainee, is objective-driven. They are seeking to get information as efficiently as possible along with completing any accompanying tasks. Consider developing your training in a way where the activity learners need to complete takes a primary role. Instead of delivering all of the information and making learners do an activity at the end of content delivery, make the experience between the activity and the content seamless. Learners will, in turn, be more motivated in engaging with the content when they already have a task to complete. Even better if you can justify eliminating a formal training session and embedding those learning components into people’s daily workflow.

Above are just some quick tips to get you started with microlearning. I realize to properly incorporate microlearning into our trainings will depend on what technology and constraints exist. At the highest level of microlearning, it would be amazing to see it incorporated right into people’s daily work, completely synchronized and embedded in the environment. With advances in augmented reality, this future may be more feasible than previously imagined. I suspect we may think of microlearning as synonymous with training and development as a concept in the future, if the results are as promising as they look right now.